With the large increase in the cost of oil and the apparent shortage of petroleum reserves, it has become increasingly feasible, economically, to recover as much lost oil as possible in the vicinity of oil drilling operations, oil refineries, oil storage tank farms and even oil spills at sea. Such oil, known as waste oil, contains large amounts of water or liquids other than oil and may have certain solids content.
In attempts to separate the usable oil from the contaminants, such waste oil has been pumped to accumulating tanks in the field, where due to specific gravity difference, the oil suitable for recovery use rises to the surface with water and higher density liquids seeking the bottom of such tanks. Such gravity separation systems take considerable time and do not take into account the existence of solids. In many cases, the separating action is hampered because of atmospheric conditions, that is, the oil itself is highly viscous at low temperatures.
Even where attempts have been made to increase the temperature of the waste oil to reduce viscosity, these recovery apparatus have been inefficient, incorrectly sized, and have had limited use due to the fixed nature of the apparatus involved.
It is, therefore, a primary object of the present invention to provide an improved compact waste oil cleaning apparatus which may be readily transported from site to site, which effectively removes both the solids and water from the waste oil and permits ready discharge of the separated and cleaned oil directly into fixed storage tanks, tractor trailer mounted transport tanks or rail tank cars.
It is a further object of this invention to provide such apparatus which is completely and wholly trailer mounted and self operated, and wherein the waste oil from a containment pond at a storage tank locale, oil refinery or well site, may be initially heated by circulating the waste oil between a fuel burner fired heat exchanger on the trailer chassis and the pond to raise the pond waste oil temperature sufficiently to permit flow through the waste oil cleaning apparatus with efficient, high rate separation of the solids and water from the oil.